Skinner

An error earlier today has taken me down an interesting by-way, that is to say Baars on Skinner, to be found at reference 1, with Baars better known to me as the inventor of the global workspace theory, of which my own local (or layered) workspace theory might be considered a variation.

Now Skinner, one of the most eminent and best known scientists in the US in the middle decades of the last century, was the leading light of the behaviourist tendency, people who believed that minds and consciousness were all piffle-paffle, not fit subjects for serious scientists. Serious scientists should confine themselves to the study of observable inputs and observable outputs, otherwise behaviour. 

Some behaviourists went so far as to deny the existence of consciousness, which seems to me to be not a little odd. While assertions that it was not a fit topic for scientists or that is was an epiphenomenon, without any real significance, were much more reasonable, certainly before the advent of modern machinery for studying what goes on inside living human brains.

Skinner was also a gifted self-publicist, with the very successful science fiction story at reference 2 and the controversial climate controlled box for babies described at reference 3 - perhaps a product of the cold winters of Minnesota.

But the burden of the Baars' paper is that Skinner led a sort of double life. As a young adult, he had ambitions to be a stream of consciousness novelist, perhaps along the lines of Proust or Joyce, very much the thing at that time. These ambitions denied, he flipped over to behaviourism and denial, at least in so far as his professional life was concerned. With consciousness only becoming a respectable subject of study again in the 1980's. Still thriving today, with papers, books, conferences and institutes all over the place. Not to mention amateurs like myself.

Baars speculates about whether this double life reflected or caused tensions, perhaps between the freedom more or less implicit in consciousness and the Calvinistic determinism of behaviourism. With Calvinism being the rather grim faith of Skinner's childhood. Lots of hell fires burning.

There was also a slightly more sinister angle, in that many mid twentieth century Soviets believed that by applying behaviourist principles one could build the Soviet man, free of the taint of selfishness so prevalent in the decadent west.

Along the way I puzzled about how it was that behaviourists ruled the roost in university psychology departments in the US, to the point where denial was academic death, while at the roughly the same time the Freudian psychoanalysts also ruled. A quick and easy option was to have a chat with Google's Bard - one question rarely suffices - the result of which was that behaviourists might have ruled in psychology departments, but psychoanalysts ruled in psychiatric and therapeutic contexts. Both fell from grace with the coming of the 1970's. Bit more investigation needed. 

In any event, a reminder that fads and fashions are as important in academe as they are everywhere else. A rather different example being that thirty years ago you had to get the word 'AIDS' into your research proposal if you wanted it to fly, now is has to be 'climate change' - with 'COVID' being just a blip in this scheme of things. A Tory might say that this was just another example of market forces at work. But maybe we have moved on in that we are not so keen on setting up binary dichotomies, where you have to be either A or B - or worse still A or not-A - you are either with us or against us - and we leave more room for gradients and mixtures.

PS 1: Skinner made sure that he left plenty of material for the biographers whom he knew were sure to come after. Not least his fat, three volume autobiography. From where I associate to Simenon, who did something of the same sort. I wonder if he was as vain as Simenon?

PS 2: the bees or wasps were at the ivy flowers outside this morning. Flowers snapped above. Plenty of buzzing, but only a few smudges made it to the snap, even when zoomed up a bit. BH noticed them too, somewhere in Leatherhead.

References

Reference 1: The double life of B F Skinner: Inner conflict, dissociation and the scientific taboo against consciousness - B. J. Baars – 2003.

Reference 2: Walden Two - B. F. Skinner - 1948. A sequel to Huxley's 'Brave New World', which had come out fifteen years previously?

Reference 3: Baby in a box - B F Skinner - 1945. Ladies Home Journal.

Reference 4: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/skinner-air-crib. More on the box.

Reference 5: The principles of psychology - William James - 1890. James allowed consciousness in this famous book, to the point of coining the well known phrase 'stream of consciousness'. Professionally suppressed, as it were, for the better part of a century.